Macworld experiences mixed results with MacBook Air SSD upgrades

Computers are like cars: while the vast majority of owners are happy to drive around in their car for years, exactly the way they came off of the dealer's lot, some people want to customize their wheels immediately. It's not surprising that for some owners of Apple's popular MacBook Air, the first thing that they want to do is supercharge their lightweight laptops with a bigger, faster flash drive.

Macworld did a series of tests of the Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD upgrades from OWC (Apple refers to the drives as flash storage, while OWC calls them SSDs) that can add those precious GBs to your Air. What they found was that while the marketing materials for the OWC drives claim huge performance leaps for MacBook Airs equipped with those drives, the company is using automated tests that don't mimic real-life laptop usage.

The test results revealed that, in many cases, the SSDs showed mixed performance results when tested in common tasks, such as using Adobe Photoshop CS5, importing and processing images with Aperture and iPhoto and performing common file actions in Finder.

That's not to say that the OWC SSDs aren't worthwhile. On the contrary, the drives are about the only way for MacBook Air users to increase storage capacity past the 256 GB maximum for the stock 13-inch Air, and the 128 GB of storage in the maxed-out stock 11-inch Air.